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Today's Opinions

SANTA FE — “If I’m elected governor, I’ll fire every single political appointee.” Sound familiar? You’ve likely heard that promise from every single gubernatorial candidate for almost a year.

We’re down to only two candidates now and this is one campaign promise you can expect either of them to keep. Governors always do. They want their own trusted individuals around them, not the former governor’s buddies.

SANTA FE — Last week a truly amazing event occurred in the world of sports. Detroit’s Armando Galarraga pitched a perfect game. He threw to the minimum 27 hitters and didn’t let anyone get to first base. It had only happened 20 times previously in the 134-year history of Major League Baseball.

There was only one catch. Umpire Jim Joyce called the final batter safe at first. Baseball doesn’t have instant replay as pro football and basketball do, so the decision stood.

The Trinity Place development project is moving into a new, more public phase in the coming months. Since Los Alamos County terminated its exclusive developer arrangement with the Boyer Company last fall, many people have assumed that the project was “dead” or that work on the project had ceased.

That has not been the case, although the difficulties being experienced throughout the U.S. economy have made for slow going over the winter.

When Fire Chief Douglass MacDonald came to Los Alamos in December 1992 what he noticed first was the dangerous wilderness/urban interface that surrounded the Hill. Having come from a wildlands fire background, he decided to work to mitigate the imminent danger posed by the overcrowded forest.

In 1994, Los Alamos held an Interagency Fire Symposium. In 1995, the U.S. Forest Service attempted a controlled burn around Western Area, but the community wasn’t ready. People complained about the smoke and cutting down trees.

Twelve trillion bottles of beer on the wall, 12 trillion bottles of beer. You take one down and toss it around and before you know it, you’ll see 13 trillion bottles up there! No, no, no, I shouldn’t use beer in this analogy. The last thing I would ever want to do is bad mouth beer.

The national spotlight is on Arizona for doing what the federal government and previous Gov. Napolitano refused to do: rein in an invasion of illegal aliens bankrupting Arizona. At an August 2009 healthcare town hall in Phoenix, legislators said that more than half of Arizona’s $4 billion budget deficit was the result of paying for three areas of services to illegal immigrants: education, healthcare and incarceration.

What does illegal immigration have to do with your costs and your access to medical care when you need it?

It has been my observation over the last several years that the barking dog issue is, at best, difficult to address. This is primarily because many (if not the majority) of dog owners are oblivious to the fact that their dogs bark — and/or believe that it is their right to let them bark at anything (or nothing), any time of the day … “for protection.” There is even one person in our neighborhood that drives around in a pick-up, with his dog constantly barking all the way — setting off most of the others along the way. How insensitive can one be?